Failing to plan is planning to fail. If this is true, most Americans are planning to live in retirement with very little money and are going to rely heavily on Social Security to get by. That is the case today where most retirees get the bulk of their income from Social Security. Back when the 401k plan was introduced, the thought was many people would squirrel away money each month and after 30 or 40 years of working, there would be a large nest egg thanks to a raging stock market. Stock market growth has tempered and most people just didn’t participate. So now as many Americans enter retirement age most are realizing they are going to work until they die. The 401k plan was introduced in 1978 and the end result for most Americans is that it has failed.

The appetite for debt is now back in a furious way. Total household debt was up $63 billion last quarter driven largely by auto loans. Auto loans increased by $32 billion and the amount of auto debt outstanding is stunning. There is now a total of $1.14 trillion in auto loans floating in our economy. We’ve discussed that a large part of the growth has come in the form of subprime auto debt and that trend seems to be continuing. While Americans in many cases are too broke to afford a home, they are now able to purchase depreciating assets that lose value the minute they roll off the lot. This is unfortunately a bad omen since many families are trying to keep up the pretense of being middle class by buying cars that they cannot afford on credit. Debt is back and it must feel like a comfortable old shirt.

There is one thing to discuss the minimum wage for servers and many others that work in the low paid service industry but it is another thing to discuss “underpaid” state workers. That statement cannot be said for California’s state employees. In a country where the median household income is $52,000 California seems to be the land of largesse. There is this narrative that state workers take on jobs that pay much less than the private sector but the data in California shows something very different. In fact, there are armies of highly paid state workers. There was a study that looked at state workers and the number of people earning six-figures is somewhat mind boggling. Let us look at the figures.

While people argue about what is real and fake news the widening gulf of inequality in the real world only continues to expand. This is actually happening and for the ultra wealthy that hold most of the wealth, all of this distraction is a good thing. The latest wealth report from Deutsche Bank Research shows that wealth inequality is at levels last seen during the Roaring 20s. The problem with this kind of inequality is that it has come from largely hollowing out the middle class and also creating a large crony financial system that is designed to suck out productivity in the real economy and shuffle it over to folks in suits sitting behind Bloomberg terminals. In other words, those that work and build the economy get shafted from the financial hubs of the world. This global financial drain does not adhere to national borders but is driven by the worldwide financial elite that collect trophy apartments in major metro areas. All this happens while your typical American family struggles to buy a home. There is nothing fake about the current level of wealth inequality.

In the midst of everything that is going on, the bond market took a big hit to the tune of $1 trillion. What this means is that mortgage rates tied to Treasury bonds had a massive move, the largest in many years. The 30-year fixed rate mortgage rate jumped to nearly 4 percent, the highest rate in a year. The trend looks to continue as the expectation of inflation is now expected to happen. There are a variety of reasons as to why this will happen and we will go into this later in the article. But this jump in the mortgage market happened during a time that the homeownership rate is already low because people are too broke to afford homes at inflated prices. This is a problem because people are already walking on a financial edge. The housing market just got more expensive for regular people.